Office Arguments
I work at a small company, and we have a few standing arguments that will never be resolved and will likely continue forever. I’d like to know if this is normal.
Do any of you have something similar? Leave your stories in the comments.
I’ll share a few of our standing arguments:
- In a one-on-one fight to the death between a coworker of ours and a female cow who would win? (no tools, weapons, sticks, rocks may be used)
- What is a sport, what is a game. Is a given activity a sport or a game or a contest.
- Are fish closer to vegetables than animals? (food-wise, i.e. are the advanced enough to feel pain or is it morally equivalent to eating celery)
- The Monty Hall problem.
There are so many more, and none of them are more useful (or resolvable) than those.
Basically the only argument around my company is: Electrical vs. Mechanical. Allow me to illustrate things:
Figure 1 A simple mechanical system. I can see, without any formal training, that For each turn of the Yellow gear (12 teeth) clockwise, I’ll see two turns of the blue gear (6 teeth) counterclockwise.
Figure 2 A simple electrical RC circuit - Obviously, even if I defined what each symbol meant to you (or what the letters stood for), this circuit would still rely on a heavy concentration of invisible magical forces in order to do anything once constructed.
Sander, it’s easy. That circuit stands for: C Merf.
What’s C Merf?
My office is about the size of a typical bedroom; it used to just be me in there, which was nice, but now there are THREE people who sit in there. The problem is that there are only two work stations, so our “few standing arguments” usually consist of who gets to sit down.
Anybody who bets on your coworker is wrong. Cows are big, strong, and if it was motivated it could easily kill any person who wasn’t specifically trained in bovine combat.
At my Kung Fu academy bovine combat is taught at brown belt. Hopefully I’ll be trained in that by October. Until then, I remain vulnerable.
Luckily, if there is one thing most cows lack, it is motivation.
At my company we have had the “what defines a sport vs a game” debate before too. There is also a lot of “do you think so and so could beat me in arm wrestling?” debates. And pudding bets. We have chocolate puddings with crumbled oreo topping in our cafe for sale at $1 each. Somewhere along the lines they became currency here. So, all bets are made in puddings. And people have made pudding bets about everything. How to spell a word. Can I jump high enough to hit my head on the ceiling. Finishing their lunch. Can someone get a date for an event. Measurements conversions. Red Sox. Golf. Anything really!!
At my last company the standard bet currency was a bottle of wine. Sometimes bets would accumulate and there would just be a party where everyone brought some wine, and sometimes it would just be one person who owned a bottle, and the winner would bring some cheese. it was a pretty awesome betting system.
Fueling one of the arguments, I once read an article that counted the following among the top sports in America:
-NASCAR
-Competitive Eating
-Bowling
-Video Games
Needless to say, I wrote a strongly worded letter in response.